Advances in optics and storage media have led to the creation of cost-efficient holographic storage systems. In a holographic storage system, data pages may be stored in a holographic medium by using an interference pattern between a signal beam and a reference beam to change the refractive index of areas of the medium. A data page may be written into the medium as a bit array through the use of a spatial light modulator (SLM). Changing the properties of the reference beam, e.g., incident angles, wavelength, etc., may allow the same three-dimensional space to be used for many pages.
The read operations of these holographic storage systems involve providing the same reference beam into the holographic medium without the signal beam, which may result in a reproduced signal beam displaying the stored bit array. This reproduced signal beam may be converted to electrical signals, equalized, and decoded through a read channel.
While these holographic storage systems are capable of high storage densities with a long archival life, limitations in present read channels may prevent applications from taking full advantage of these storage systems.